Climbing the firewall in China

While traveling in China, the government will prevent you from accessing Google, Gmail, Google maps, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, The New York Times, and many other news sites. If any of these services are important to you, you need to use a very good VPN to circumvent the censoring. (China is able to block some VPNs that work elsewhere). The best VPN for China is the ExpressVPN app, which you can load on your phone and laptop. Once loaded it’s pretty seamless and unnoticeable. You can reach any site with fine speed. There’s a monthly subscription of $8.32, but it’s worth it compared to cheaper and free VPNs. It’s useful anywhere in the world sites are blocked. Even in the West, if I am accessing a public wifi spot for my mail I’ll turn it on as an added layer of privacy. — KK

Recomendo is a weekly newsletter that gives you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff.

Curated by Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder and Claudia Dawson, our goal is to give our readers a weekly list of 6 things we love — travel tips, books, TV shows, clothes, tools, websites, podcasts, and so on. We want people to be able to read the entire newsletter in 90 seconds or less, with no fluff or wheel spinning.